It was raining when I left the Auld Brewhouse where I had spent the night. I rode up to Arbroath Abbey where I spent too long looking at the heavily plundered stone and contemplating the Declaration of Arbroath and its significance.
It stopped raining by the time I left, which was far too late. I used a fair bit of NCN 1 as I made my way along the coast. I had a quick lunch in Montrose, as I wanted to get to Dunnottar Castle in time for a visit. Before leaving the town, I made the fatal error of applying sunscreen. This tempted fate into causing it to fog over for a good bit.
Dunnottar Castle was well chosen as a defensive site. It sits on an isolated rock on the coast which is hard to access on foot whilst unopposed. It would have been extremely difficult if the occupants resisted.
Not impossible as at least twice it has fallen. The first time it was taken was by William Wallace in what was probably a sneak attack. He promptly burnt the English garrison to death in the chapel. This probably justifies the English later hanging, drawing and quartering him.
The second time was when Oliver Cromwell and company besieged the place trying to get their hands on the Scottish Crown Jewels. They failed to get the jewels as the wily Scots managed to smuggle them out somehow before the Castle fell. There is a diorama of the siege in Castle which shows two impressive gun batteries in the Castle. This surprised me as I thought it would be a pain just to get food, etc. to the Castle. They must have been very determined and clever to haul a dozen canons up. Then again, it must have taken a lot of effort to build the place as the stones themselves would have had to have been carried by hand or garron up the narrow paths.
This last element helped preserve the site after the last occupants were on the wrong side of 1715 with predictable consequences. The difficult access made it relatively little used as source of stone for locals, very much unlike Arbroath Abbey, of which very little remains in situ.
Another infamous bit of history was the time 177 men and women were imprisoned for months in a cellar for refusing to acknowledge the king as the head of the church. Most did not survive the experience or being shipped to the New World for penal servitude. They were fools in my opinion. Then again, my ancestors' motto seems to have been: “When it comes time to sell out, get a good price.”
Dunnottar was a shock as it was heavily patronized by foreign tourists. I know I heard Spanish, French, Dutch, German and Italian being spoken. Other languages, distinctly possible.
There was a lovely hill down to Stonehaven from Dunnottar Castle. This might have lured me into a bad choice. I was tempted to catch a train the rest of the way into Aberdeen, but I didn’t, confident that I would make it guided by my road map, Google Maps on the iPhone and the NCN. The basis of what went wrong showed up just outside of Stonehaven in the form a nearly completed motorway running North. It wasn’t open, but not only was it not on my road map, I was later to discover the Google Maps didn’t know about it. The NCN route took me through a maze of back roads, that at times went against my instincts. Nearing Aberdeen, I chose to believe Google Maps over it. After a longish downhill, I ended up on a dead end caused by the new motorway. The easiest way out turned out to be the very busy A90. I was sufficiently tired that I didn’t give a damn about the high speed traffic: it lead to Aberdeen and it was downhill. I was soon doing 50 km/h.
I found the hostel at about 6:30. I was disappointed to find my room was on the top floor which owing to poor planning, meant three trips up before I could shower, then check Google for the nearest place to eat. Thankfully, that was just across the street, as I have rarely felt so exhausted.
Thankfully, today is a rest day as I am still exhausted.
After doing laundry this morning, my first stop was to get the NCN map for Aberdeenshire. As Mummy has commented to me, I have been using the NCN more this trip than on other trips to the UK. There are several reasons for this. The first is that I happen to have chosen a route that the NCN has mapped. Note the frequency of references to NCN route 1. This is a major route which many cyclists have done before me. As well, I am traveling in areas well equipped with backroads, but less so with signs. Furthermore, I now require reading glasses to read maps, so on-the-fly map reading is a thing of the past. I now bike with reading glasses around my neck. All this to say that the NCN is now more useful to me now than before.
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